Predictions

100 MILLION YEARS OF FOSSIL SEX REVEALED, according to BBC News 18 June 2009. A new technique for examining the internal structure of fossils has enabled scientists to examine the reproductive organs of ostracod (tiny shellfish) fossils from the Santana Formation in Brazil. The fossils were embedded in rocks that also contained well preserved fish. Renate Matzke-Karasz of the Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany, used a technique called holotomography, to examine the fossils and found the ostr... Click here for more...

ANCIENT CAVE BUGS RESIST ANTIBIOTICS, according to a report in National Geographic News and ScienceDaily 11 April 2012, and PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (4): e34953 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034953. Scientists exploring the Lechuguilla cave, a vast deep cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, have found bacteria they believed to have been isolated for four million years. The cave was discovered in 1986 and entry to it has been strictly limited. In 2008 the National Park authorities allowe... Click here for more...

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE IS ANCIENT, according to articles in Nature doi:10.1038/nature10388 and ScienceNOW 31 August 2011, and ABC News in Science 1 September 2011. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are often presented as evidence for evolution, especially as some of the tougher hospital “superbugs” are resistant to modern day man-made antibiotics. A group of Canadian researchers have analysed bacterial DNA from samples obtained from deeply buried frozen soil, dated at 30,000 years, from the... Click here for more...

One of our readers asks: “I read an evolutionist blog the other day on creation science arguments. One was on vestigial organs vs genetic loss. He said that creationists say there are no vestigial organs (which is true), but there are examples of things that do not fully function i.e. beetles of the same species; some have wings and some don't. Another example is the earwig. Some earwigs have wings but as far as I know they don't fly. They stay in moist undergrowth and under rock... Click here for more...

AS PREDICTED, WE ARE STILL HERE. In our Evidence News 15 December 2010 we reported a claim made by an organisation called eBible Fellowship that the world would end on 21st May 2011. As we believe the words of Jesus who said that only the Father in Heaven knows when the world will end and no man does, (Matthew 24:36), we therefore predicted the world would NOT end on 21st May 2011.
W... Click here for more...

AUSSIE LUNGFISH STUDY reported in New Scientist, 11/9/99 p25 found the Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri, uses the same protective proteins as those in human lungs. The only difference was that all cells in the fish lung lining made the protein whereas all other air breathing vertebrates have specialised cells for making these proteins. The researchers offered no explanation for where such proteins originated. Their only conclusion was they must have been preserved for ... Click here for more...

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES CAME FROM INDIA, according to a report in ScienceDaily, 23 July 2009. Raghavendra Rao and colleagues involved in the Anthropological Survey of India project have analysed 966 complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from members of India’s “relic tribes” and found central Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic tribes shared genetic traits otherwise only found in Australian aborigines. Rao explained: "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace... Click here for more...

BACTERIA EASE BELLY ACHES, as reported in New Scientist, 10 Jan 2004, p16. Some chronic inflammatory intestinal diseases result from the intestinal lining not being able to turn off the inflammatory response after it has fought off infection by nasty bacteria. A harmless bacterium that lives in the intestines has been found to secrete a chemical signal that helps the lining of the intestines turn off inflammation after the bad bacteria have gone.

BAD DOGS CAUSED BY BAD TRAINING, according to a study reported in Science Daily, 1 May 2009. A group of researchers at University of Córdoba (UCO), Spain have studied 711 dogs (354 males and 357 females), including 594 purebreds and 117 half-breeds, to see what factors were most associated with aggressive behaviour. The animals were a mix of breeds traditionally considered to be aggressive, such as Rottweiler and Bull Terrier, and breeds with reputations for mild temperament such as Dalmatian ... Click here for more...

BAFFLED MOLECULAR BIOLOGISTS, according to a report in Nature, vol. 423 p91, 1 May 2003 and ScienceNOW, 2 May 2003. In recent years numerous pieces of DNA have been found that do not code for proteins. Many pieces are shortened versions of known functional genes, so biologists named them "pseudogenes" and have written them off as "genetic train wrecks", the result of functional genes being knocked around in the hurly-burly of evolution. There are an estimated 20,000 of these and evolut... Click here for more...

BEST CANDIDATE FOR HOMO ANCESTOR FOUND, according to BBC News 8 April 2010, and Science, vol. 328, p154 & 195, 9 April 2010. Palaeontologists in South Africa have found two partial skeletons of a new species of Australopithecus that “may be the best candidate yet for the immediate ancestor of our genus, Homo.” They have been given the name Australopithecus sediba and have been dated as being 2 million years old. The bones are from two individuals: a juvenile of estimated age 11 ... Click here for more...

BIRD CLASSIFICATION PROBLEM described in New Scientist 11 Dec 2004, p11. Matthew Fain and Peter Houde of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA have studied the gene for a protein called beta fibrinogen in an attempt to work out evolutionary relationships between different birds. They looked at differences in the DNA code letters in the bf gene in 150 bird families and concluded that birds classified as "Neoaves" (literally "new birds") really consist of two subg... Click here for more...

BIRDS MOVE BRANCHES IN EVOLUTIONARY TREE, according to New Scientist news, 26 June 2008, print edition 2 July 2008, and Science, vol. 320, p1763, 27 June 2008. Sushma Reddy, an evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago and colleagues have worked out the DNA letter sequence in 19 regions of the genome of 169 bird species and then used them to construct a new evolutionary tree for birds. They were surprised by some of the results. For example: “falcons ar... Click here for more...

CAMBRIAN LAND PLANTS fossils found in Grand Canyon and Tennessee rocks (USA), reports New Scientist, 18 Mar. 2000, p15. Geologist Paul Strother of Boston College, Massachusetts presented his Cambrian discoveries to recent meeting of Geological Society of America - fossil spores similar to present day liverworts. Land plant spores had previously been found in middle Ordovician rocks but new spores are believed (by evolutionists) to be 510 million years old, a time when most claim life was ... Click here for more...

CANE TOADS EVOLVE AGAIN, according to articles in BBC Earth News 19 Oct 2010 and Journal of Evolutionary Biology, published online 7 Oct 2010, DOI:10.1111/j.1420¬9101.2010.02118.x. Cane toads were introduced to eastern Queensland, Australia in the 1930s and have been spreading out across northern Australia ever since at an increasingly rapid rate. In 2006 toad researchers reported that the toads at the front of the advance were evolving longer, stronger legs. Biologists at James Cook U... Click here for more...

CANE TOADS EVOLVE IN SPACE reported in ABC News in Science 22 March 2011 and PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018989108. Rick Shine of University of Sydney and colleagues claim to have found a new mechanism of evolution after studying the relentless march of cane toads across northern Australia. According to the researchers, the rate of toad invasion has accelerated due to the toads evolving longer legs and being able to run faster than previous generations. Shine explained: “We know it's evolutionary... Click here for more...

CHALLENGING EINSTEIN WITH "SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY," as reported in The Guardian, 11 Apr 2005, The Age, (Melbourne, Australia) and Cambridge (UK) Evening News 12 Apr 2005. Michael Murphy of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy has told a meeting of physicists at Warwick University that one of the foundational assumptions of Einstein's special theory of relativity, i.e. that the speed of light is unchanging, may be wrong. Ironically the physics conference he was speaking at ... Click here for more...

CHIMP GENES 83% NON-HUMAN, according to The International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium’s report in Nature, vol. 429, p382, and Nature Science Update, 27 May 2004. The consortium carried out a detailed study of one chimpanzee chromosome, number 22, and compared it with the equivalent human chromosome, number 21. (The reason for comparing chimp chromosome 22 with human chromosome 21 is that chimps have 48 chromosomes and humans have 46, so equivalent gene sequences are not on the s... Click here for more...

CHIMP GENOME SEQUENCE COMPLETED reported news@nature, ScienceNOW 31 Aug 2005, and Nature, vol 437, p69, 1 Sep 2005. The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, a group of 67 scientists working from 23 scientific institutions in five countries, have published the first draft of the complete chimpanzee genome and have begun to make comparisons with the human genome. The differences found between chimps and man were "35 million single nucleotide substitutions (DNA letter changes), 5 m... Click here for more...

CHIMPS AND HUMANS TASTE DIFFERENT, according to a report in Nature, vol 440, p930, 13 April 2006. Every student of biology has probably participated in an experiment to see who can taste a chemical called PTC. The ability to taste this is genetically determined, with the tasting gene being dominant and the non-tasting being recessive. In 1939 three scientists Fisher, Ford and Huxley, tested apes for the ability to taste PTC and found the same variation in the ability to taste it. This was claime... Click here for more...